Former Bungie composer Marty O’Donnell has spoken to IGN about a cancelled game project from the developer called Gypsum.
The team behind the project originally worked on another cancelled game, Phoenix, which staff at the studio said they were more excited about than Halo. For various reasons, Phoenix never took off and the team was permitted to work on a new project, which became Gypsum. The game cast players as a Minotaur, a half man, half bull creature from Greek mythology in a third-person mythical fantasy game.
O’Donnell says development on Gypsum went quite far and he produced music for the game. He believes the game was built on a modified version of the Halo: Combat Evolved engine with some remnants of the Phoenix engine included.
The only other game to be released on the Halo 1 engine was Stubbs the Zombie.
Gypsum had a “very good playable prototype demo that I think you could play for 20 minutes and do an entire level.”
Bungie eventually abandoned the project because it needed all of its staff to work on Halo 2. The Oni team from shuttered studio Bungie West were developing a project called Monster Hunter at Bungie Seattle (no connection to what would become Capcom’s franchise) at a conceptual level, which O’Donnell remembers doing a treatment on. That team was reassigned to Halo 1 multiplayer and as the scope of Halo 2 expanded, all other projects at the studio were cancelled.
These days, 343 Industries develops the Halo games, most recently Halo 5: Guardians while The Creative Assembly is currently working on Halo Wars 2. Bungie has moved on to Destiny and is currently developing a sequel which is due for release in 2017.
O’Donnell was fired from the developer in 2014. He recently spoke out about that experience.
